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I was never really convinced of the counter argument "the combination of the man plus the rules understand chinese, not either individually". To understand some

I was never really convinced of the counter argument "the combination of the man plus the rules understand chinese, not either individually". To understand something is to have a conscious experience of the feeling of understanding. I'm sure most people would agree no conscious experience of understanding would emerge from the combination of man + rule set. Many people involved with computers like to discount qualia, but it is real and part of the thing we call consciousness. Furthermore, on a more classical computational, non-dualist level, one needs to not only know the rule set but generally also has some meta knowledge of the rules themselves when one says they understand a thing. I can program but I can also explain why I'm writing the program I am as I'm doing it, how the different parts will interact to produce the whole, etc. I have some knowledge of my own inner black box, something the Chinese room setup lacks.

fixermark 11y ago
Qualia is discountable because it can't really be proved that you have it (from my perspective) or that I have it (from your perspective). The short counter-argument to whether the man/rule system understands Chinese is "I'm not a man/rulebook, so I have no idea if that's conscious or not."
ekidd 11y ago
I'm sure most people would agree no conscious experience of understanding would emerge from the combination of man + rule set. There's a subtle dishonesty in the Chinese room experiment, because it's asking you to imagine a system which is many orders of magnitude too small to have an intelligent conversation in Chinese (or in any other language). Using some back-of-the-envelope numbers from Moravec, based on his research into visual algorithms that duplicate the human retina, the absolute minimum number of operations to do what the brain does would appear to be around 10^15 operations per second (and possibly much, much higher). If we assume that man in the room can perform one operation per second, and that we need to provide at least 10 seconds of normal conversation, that means the man in the room will need to work non-stop for 310 million years. (If you said, "No, more like 30 billion," I'd say, "Sure, that's totally plausible." Or even 30 trillion.) Now, if we assume that the man spends, say, 5 million years working down one cortical column and up another, modelling complex patterns of visual recognition, language analysis, vocabulary selection, and so on, then my intuition no longer tells me whether or not there's an immense, glacial consciousness playing out inside that room. While we wait for an answer new phyla will evolve, entire species will arise and go extinct, and so on. If we've even slightly underestimated the computation required, the sun will turn into a red giant and wipe out life on the planet before the Chinese room responds, "Hey, how are you doing?" There's a second possibility here: Maybe the Chinese room isn't a very slow computer. Maybe it's a giant lookup table, containing every possible Chinese conversation. I'm pretty sure a lookup table isn't conscious. But if we use a lookup table, then it's going to need to be unimaginably larger than our entire universe. If Searle wants to appeal to intuition, he needs to make his appeals realistic. He can't sweep 300+ million years under the rug, for example. Or hide a lookup table which makes the entire universe look like a speck of dust in comparison.

fixermark 11y ago

Qualia is discountable because it can't really be proved that you have it (from my perspective) or that I have it (from your perspective). The short counter-argument to whether the man/rule system understands Chinese is "I'm not a man/rulebook, so I have no idea if that's conscious or not."

ekidd 11y ago

I'm sure most people would agree no conscious experience of understanding would emerge from the combination of man + rule set. There's a subtle dishonesty in the Chinese room experiment, because it's asking you to imagine a system which is many orders of magnitude too small to have an intelligent conversation in Chinese (or in any other language). Using some back-of-the-envelope numbers from Moravec, based on his research into visual algorithms that duplicate the human retina, the absolute minimum number of operations to do what the brain does would appear to be around 10^15 operations per second (and possibly much, much higher). If we assume that man in the room can perform one operation per second, and that we need to provide at least 10 seconds of normal conversation, that means the man in the room will need to work non-stop for 310 million years. (If you said, "No, more like 30 billion," I'd say, "Sure, that's totally plausible." Or even 30 trillion.) Now, if we assume that the man spends, say, 5 million years working down one cortical column and up another, modelling complex patterns of visual recognition, language analysis, vocabulary selection, and so on, then my intuition no longer tells me whether or not there's an immense, glacial consciousness playing out inside that room. While we wait for an answer new phyla will evolve, entire species will arise and go extinct, and so on. If we've even slightly underestimated the computation required, the sun will turn into a red giant and wipe out life on the planet before the Chinese room responds, "Hey, how are you doing?" There's a second possibility here: Maybe the Chinese room isn't a very slow computer. Maybe it's a giant lookup table, containing every possible Chinese conversation. I'm pretty sure a lookup table isn't conscious. But if we use a lookup table, then it's going to need to be unimaginably larger than our entire universe. If Searle wants to appeal to intuition, he needs to make his appeals realistic. He can't sweep 300+ million years under the rug, for example. Or hide a lookup table which makes the entire universe look like a speck of dust in comparison.